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Franz Boas and the Discovery of Culture 17
theorists as the amateurs and the pseudo-scientists. This condescension, together with
Virchow’s attempt to enforce a monogenist “ethic” in anthropological publications,
separated the two camps by mutual contempt. In America, Boas was to hold a similar
attitude towards amateur anthropology. There were, however, publications that
Virchow’s society did not control, and in these margins race theorists, such as Ludwig
Woltmann and Wilhelm Schallmayer, the founder of German eugenics, maintained some
scientific authority. A few were low-profile members of the society itself.
Boas also inherited the faults of liberal German physical anthropology, as well as
its strengths. In 1889, Virchow noted in a presidential speech that, since its
institutionalization, physical anthropology had retrogressed. 39 It had based itself too much
on anthropometry, busied itself too much at organizing conflicting classifications of
craniometric human “types,” most famously according to the cephalic index. In 1891, the
leading Hungarian anthropologist, Aurel von Török, suggested that craniometry would
“degenerate into the wizardry of deceptive fortune-telling by skulls,” because it was
based on a misleading assumption that the arithmetic mean revealed a natural type. 40 He
produced convincing evidence that, on the one hand, the most primitive “virgin” tribes
showed considerable skull variation, while, on the other hand, known crossbred “races”
seemed to have a “pure” type. This devastating critique was greeted skeptically by the
older generation of anthropologists, who had invested much of their careers in
anthropometry. The resulting feud weakened the authority of the society. Boas was, much
later, to receive similar criticism for his own work.
The Anthropologist
Boas spent just about a year among the Eskimos of Baffin Island. His appreciation
of them was typically romantic, as seen in his descriptions of their “beautiful” customs:
“I often ask myself what advantages our ‘good society’ possesses over that of the
‘savages’ and find, the more I see of their customs, that we have no right to look down
upon them.” 41 He saw “psychic unity” everywhere, in that quality he called
Herzenbildung (inner character): “The evil as well as the value of a person lies in
Herzenbildung, which I find or find lacking here just as much as among us.” 42 He was
more of an observer than a participant. He wrote of himself: “I am now a true Eskimo. I
live as they do, hunt with them, and belong to the men of Anarnitung.” 43 He was,
however, referring only to superficial activities that he had learned, particularly hunting,
not to any deep sense of belonging. He did not even make friends among the “men of
Anarnitung,” and often wrote, in his letters to Marie, of his loneliness. Weike, his
countryman, proved a less than stimulating companion.
The expedition’s first base was Kekerten Island, from which Boas embarked on
mapping excursions until he could find enough Eskimos to hire for a boat crew. His
principal aid at the time was Signa, a fifty-year-old Eskimo originally from Davis Strait,
whose help he secured by the gift of a Mauser rifle, bread and tobacco. Additionally, he
received help from the whaler James Mutch, in whose quarters he lived. After numerous
39 Massin, p. 106
40 Massin, p. 109
41 Cole, p. 79
42 Cole, p. 79
43 Cole, p. 78